Dick Cavett And Groucho Marx: Together Again, Today.

   

Seventy-one year-old Manhattanite Dick Cavett is a national treasure. He has spent much of his career interviewing the most influential and important entertainers, politicians, and artists of his time, in an intelligent, elegant, in-depth, and yet hysterical manner. A writer first and last, Cavett started his career in comedy here in Manhattan, writing for Jack Paar, Merv Griffin, and Jerry Lewis. He has won three Emmy Awards, but struggled with balancing commercialism and intelligent discourse.

In a 1971 Time Magazine interview, Cavett lamented,

“I always feel torn between viewers who call or write and say they’re so grateful to be able to switch away from yakking actresses and the necessity of having the yakking starlets for the ratings. It would be an awful lot easier to just not give a damn. It’s such a drag. I sometimes wish I had made a clear decision that I was going to be strictly commercial or that I was going to provide a radical alternative. But either would have been a false decision. I’m not all that enthralled by show business, and I’m not that much of a highbrow. I hate the idea that acting like a jackass is beneath me, that I’m some kind of cultural uplifter.”

His most-famous interviews from “The Dick Cavett Show” include those of Lucille Ball, Woody Allen, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Katharine Hepburn, Truman Capote, Jacques Cousteau, Jimmy Hendrix, Salvador Dali, and Groucho Marx.

In 1968, Dick Cavett interviewed Groucho Marx, considered another American treasure, who was also an actor, comedian, and fellow television host. That interview will be shown today at 3:00 PM EST on the Turner Classic Movies cable television channel. (Here in Manhattan, on Time Warner Cable channel 82.) The Cavett/Marx interview is sandwiched within TCM’s Marx Brothers marathon, which begins at 7:30 AM with the 1952 comedy, “A Girl In Every Port.” The marathon, which includes At The Circus, Room Service, and A Day At The Races, culminates with what is perhaps the best-loved Marx Brothers movie, A Night At The Opera.

Today, Mr. Cavett still lives in Manhattan, and occasionally writes a blog, “Talk Show,” for The New York Times.

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Elsewhere:
The Dick Cavett Show available on DVD at The Shout Factory.
The USA Today review of The Dick Cavett Show DVD set.
Dick Cavett at IMDB.
The Marx Brothers at Wikipedia.

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Tags: Dick Cavett, Dick Cavett , Emmy Award-winning, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jerry Lewis, Marx Brothers, Merv Griffin, Talk Show, Time Magazine, Woody Allen